Why would a weaker business laptop, outperform a consumer laptop with better hardware?

Question

Hello all,

I just started work and received and HP EliteBook with an 8th generation i5, my previous old computer was a HP Pavilion with an 8th generation i7. The EliteBook is much faster, although it has definitely seen more usage, has not been constantly been placed on a cooling rack like mine, and I completely factory reset mine every year, why is that?

Also please note I have went to benchmarking websites and have seen that the processor on the i7 should be faster (i7-8565U vs i5 8265U).

Thanks!

Edit: They both have SSD’s and both have 16GB of ram, the Pavilion has an MX250 GPU while the EliteBook has a UHD 620 onboard graphics

In: Technology

Answer 1

One possibility is that the chips can use two kinds of RAM, DDR4-2400 or LPDDR3-2133. If your i7 came with LPDDR, it’ll run cooler and use less battery, but memory performance wil be lower.

Another possibility is SSD. Not all SSD is made the same. Some are faster than others, some layouts are faster, and some SSD controllers are faster. As an example on layouts, the Apple M2 MacBook Air 256 GB had much slower SSD performance than the M1 MacBook Air 256 GB. This was because the M1 256 GB option used two 128 GB SSD modules giving two separate data paths to the CPU, while the M2 used one 256 GB module with one data path. An M2 configured with 512 GB used two SSD modules, so the SSD performance went back up.